In many service related industries a customer service request necessitates the scheduling of an appointment for a service provider to perform the requested service. Providing service schedules for large numbers of service requests and relatively large numbers of service providers is typically difficult to accomplish in a cost effective manner. That is, it is difficult to arrange service appointments providing high utilization of service provider personnel without incurring inordinate scheduling time delays and/or costs.
In some service industries there are additional difficulties in scheduling in that coordination must be made with each customer to, for example, arrange access to the customer's premises. Such coordination is particularly prevalent in utility and telecommunication industries. It is typical when such coordination is required, that each customer requesting service is given a service time interval within which the customer's requested service is to be performed. Thus, a customer is required to be accessible during the service time interval for a service provider to perform the requested service.
It is common practice in industries providing such service time intervals in response to customer service requests that service time intervals are typically larger than the estimated time to perform the requested service. This strategy provides additional flexibility in scheduling service providers in that there is allowance or flexibility for schedule changes without the need for additional contacts with customers and rearrangement of service appointments. However, to provide customer satisfaction, it is also preferred that the service time intervals agree or overlap as much as possible with preferred service request times given by customers. Thus, accomplishing the two goals of effectively scheduling service providers and also accommodating the preferred service times given by customers becomes even more difficult.
Previous attempts to satisfy both the goal of efficient scheduling for service providers and the goal of accommodating customer preferred service times have focused on obtaining all or substantially all customer service requests before formulating a schedule for service providers. Thus, customers with service requests are typically contacted at some later time after the initial customer request and provided with a time which may or may not correspond with any customer preferred time interval for the service request. This strategy, however, has the disadvantages of: (a) increasing scheduling overhead in that customers must be re-contacted which may involve multiple contact attempts for a single service request; (b) necessitating further inconvenience for customers requesting service; and (c) typically requiring an early cut off date wherein no further customer requests are taken for certain dates not yet having service provider schedules.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have a scheduling capability wherein there is a service time interval provided to each customer during the initial contact when the customer requests service, wherein each service time interval substantially overlaps a customer preferred service time, and wherein the provided service time intervals obtained can be used to efficiently schedule service providers.